SACRED DEFENSE
SACRED DEFENSE
CREDITS
We’re an Empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And While your’re studying that reality – Judiciously, as you will – we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We are the history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
– Karl Rove, senior advisor to President George Bush.
It has long been said that history is written by the victors. In this series by Wawrzyniec Kolbusz (Poland) the extent of that writing is examined through the curation of the war museum and the hyper-reality of war reportage. Instead of just rewriting history Kolbusz implies that humanity is always creating new realities through how the past is displayed. Mixing different truths of the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980’s with ‘amended’ satellite imagery of nuclear installations and wax figures of fallen ‘martyrs’, reality begins to lose it’s connotations of honesty.
The attack upon this narration of war collapses reality into the hyper-reality of the simulation upon the realisation that the most seemingly documentary images are actually photos of a ‘cinema city’. Buildings, streets, and classrooms, surrounded by sandbags, riddled with bullets holes, which have been constructed as a set for war movies.
